Seeing Signal Anxiety: Davanloo’s Pathways of Anxiety Discharge

Despite the efforts of Paul Gray and others, a "developmental lag" persists in the translation of Freud's structural theory into psychodynamic clinical technique, especially regarding the clinical manifestations and significance of signal anxiety. In this article, the author introduces Habib Davanloo's pathways of anxiety discharge as a conceptual tool that can be used for detecting Freud's signal anxiety and offers clinical hypotheses that can be extrapolated from a marriage of Freud's and Davanloo's ideas. The author demonstrates the clinical application of these ideas with a case example and discusses the virtues and limitations of incorporating Davanloo's ideas into psychodynamic clinical work in general, with the hope that therapists will further test these hypotheses as they listen to and intervene with their patients.